Saturday, December 26, 2015

Bennet Omalu: A Nigerian-American Hero Nigerians at Home Don’t Know About

Dr. Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu is a big deal in America. He is
so big a deal that he is the subject of a critically acclaimed Hollywood movie called Concussion, which was released
on December 25 this year (that is, yesterday!). But chances are most Nigerians reading this article
would ask “Bennet who? Who is that?”

That was precisely the response I got when I spoke with a
group of Nigerian journalists in Abuja and Kano during a British Council-sponsored
workshop I facilitated about a month ago. Not a single journalist had any clue who
Dr. Omalu was.

Dr. Bennet Omalu

In the course of the training, our conversation veered off into
the topic of the wacky, delusional intellectual scammer called Dr. Enoch
Opeyemi who falsely claimed to have solved the Riemann Hypothesis and misled
the incredibly credulous Nigerian—and British—media into undeservedly celebrating
him before the facts of his intentional misrepresentation became public knowledge. I wondered why Nigerian journalists—and
everyday Nigerians—ignorantly celebrate all the notorious, scorn-worthy intellectual
scammers—Enoch Opeyemi, Philip Emeagwali, Gabriel Oyibo, Michael Atovigba,
etc.—but ignore genuine heroes of Nigerian descent who are doing truly
outstanding things outside Nigeria.

One of the journalists asked me to name one genuine Nigerian
hero abroad who has been ignored at home. I asked if they knew about Dr. Bennet
Omalu. I got blank stares. Strangely, I wasn’t surprised. To be noticed in
Nigeria, especially in Nigeria’s traditional media, you need to understand the
art of bluster, of vain and empty conceit. Dr. Omalu apparently didn’t reach
out to the Nigerian media, and Nigerian journalists obviously don’t give the
time of day to anyone who doesn’t court and cultivate their friendship and
attention.

But who is Dr. Omalu and why should we care? So much has
been written and said about this man in America that I don’t even know where to
start. Well, I think I should start with his claim to fame. Dr. Omalu became
famous for being “the first to publish findings of chronic traumatic
encephalopathy (CTE) in American football players.”

This sounds ordinary on the surface. But it’s actually a lot
bigger than it seems. The National Football League (NFL) is America’s
richest and most popular sport. No one takes on this American financial and
cultural behemoth and comes out alive. But Omalu did—with his brains—and is
alive to tell the story. Through careful, studious, self-financed research,
Omalu demonstrated that American football players were susceptible to the kinds
of brain injuries that boxers, wrestlers, and war veterans suffer as a result of repeated hits to their heads.

The National Football League was outraged by this. Omalu’s
findings threatened NFL’s multi-billion-dollar industry. If it is established
that playing American football rendered people susceptible to permanent,
irreversible brain injuries, the future of the sport—and the billions of
dollars it rakes in—was in grave danger. As you would expect, the NFL fought
back—and they fought dirty. Dr. Omalu’s credibility and competence were called
into question. He was accused
of “practicing voodoo,” a subtle racist dig at his Nigerian origins and the
supposed intellectual inferiority that this fact implies.

Big-name American medical researchers at the NFL demanded
that Omalu’s paper, which was published in the prestigious Neurosurgery journal, be retracted. They said the paper’s findings
were flawed. But here is where it gets interesting. Neurosurgery is a double-blind peer reviewed journal, which means
articles sent to the journal are normally reviewed by two anonymous expert
reviewers who usually don’t know each and who don’t know the identity of the
researcher who submits a paper for consideration. If the two reviewers agree
that a paper is worthy of publication, usually with minor or major revisions,
the paper gets published. If one of the two anonymous reviewers rejects the
paper, the journal’s editor may send it to a third anonymous expert reviewer
whose decision is crucial to accepting or rejecting the paper.

Although Dr. Omalu’s paper was accepted by the first two
anonymous reviewers who first examined it, because of the sensitivity and momentousness
of its findings, it was sent to more than 18 other expert reviewers! That is
highly unusual. But there was a unanimity of opinion among all the reviewers that Omalu had pushed the
boundaries of knowledge in ways no one had, and the paper was published in
2005. So if Omalu’s findings were "wrong," as NFL's doctors alleged, more than 18 top-notch American
medical researchers who reviewed his paper must be wrong as well.

Omalu published subsequent papers on the same subject-matter
to build a convincing case that playing American football (which isn’t the same
thing as “football” in British English) exposes people to the danger of brain
damage.

When NFL doctors lost the intellectual battle against him,
they shifted the battle to the emotional plain. He was accused of “attacking
the American way of life.” "How dare you, a foreigner like you, from Nigeria?
What is Nigeria known for? The eighth most corrupt country in the world? Who
are you? Who do you think you are to come to tell us how to live our lives?"
Omalu quoted
NFL officials as saying to him in an interview with the (American) National
Public Radio.

After sustained attacks on his credibility, competence, and
nationality, the NFL gave up. In 2009, the NFL publicly admitted that Omalu was
right. As a consequence, he has become a celebrity here. A book about his
accomplishments and struggles, titled Concussion,
was written by an American writer and professor by the name of Jeanne Marie
Laskas. The movie about him that was released yesterday is based on the book.

Dr. Omalu’s success is every bit Nigeria’s. A native of
Nnokwa in the Idemili South Local Government of Anambra State, the 47-year-old
Omalu earned his first medical degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
in 1990. He first came to the United States in 1994, and it is safe to say that
Nigeria provided the backdrop for his genius.

I hope the Nigerian government will recognize and celebrate
genuine heroes like Dr. Omalu whose genius is rubbing off on Nigeria
internationally.

Postscript:
I have been informed that although Dr. Bennet Omalu was born in Nnokwa in the Idemili South Local Government Area of Anambra State, his ancestral roots are actually located in Urunnebo village in Enugwu-Ukwu of Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.